By assuming Cobb-Douglas production technology, many well-known imperfectly competitive macroeconomic models of the labour market (e.g. Layard, Nickell and Jackman, 1991) imply that equilibrium unemployment is independent of the capital stock. This paper introduces a new notion of capacity into...

China has had a remarkably high ratio of investment to output throughout the period of economic reform, surpassing almost all other economies, whether developed or developing.  The high investment rate is in turn an important proximate determinant of China's high rate of economic growth.  This...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy from 1760 to 1913 and shows that it passed through a two stage evolution of inequality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the real wage stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit rate doubled and the...

We use a panel of over 120,000 Chinese firms of different ownership types over the period 2000-2007 to analyze the linkages between investment in fixed and working capital and financing constraints.  We find that those firms characterized by high working capital display high sensitivities of...

Was the London Stock Exchange (LSE) little more than a Dickensian den of speculation, or did it make a contribution to industrial development in Interwar Britain?  The interwar stock market laboured under problems of weak disclosure, inadequate investor protection and ineffective...

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy during the industrial revolution and shows that they contain a story of dramatically increasing inequality between 1800 and 1840: GDP per worker rose 37%, real wages stagnated, and the profit rate doubled. The share of...

To my knowledge this study undertakes the first comprehensive and systematic empirical test of the hypothesis that while returns to invested capital in Sub-Saharan Africa are high compared to select Asian and South American markets, investment rates are low.  I investigate three sources:...

We study two platforms competing for members by investing in network quality.  Quality is complementary to the network size: the marginal utility generated by an additional member increases with the network's quality.  Platforms are imperfect substitutes: a share of the potential members are...

This paper examines how foreign ownership affects the investment decisions of subsidiary firms using a new dataset of listed-parent - listed-subsidiary pairs.  We find that improvements in the investment opportunities of parent firms have a negative effect on the investment of their...

This paper looks at some recent work on estimating quadratic variation using realised variance (RV) - that is sums of M squared returns. This econometrics has been motivated by the advent of the common availability of high frequency financial return data. When the underlying process is a...